Optimizing bandwidth with multiport NIC

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mpoon2489

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I'm building a file server for a college dorm, and the bandwidth that each room in the dorm gets is gigabit which I think is limited by the cat 5e cables my dorm uses, and every connection in each room is hooked up to just a large switch down in the basement.

I'm trying to maximize bandwidth here and I'd rather put the file server in a room, and I would have access to more than one ethernet ports. Is it advantageous to get a multiport NIC and just run cabling from like 4 different rooms? Or would it be loads better if I somehow just put it in the basement and directly hooked it up to the switch?
 
You would need access to the switch in order to enable trunking. By what you are describing it sounds like you are just a student living in the dorms. Screwing with the campus network and running rogue file servers is probably not a good idea.
 
I feel bad for the unfortunate other students that get online to actually do something like...research, e-mail family and loved ones, surf the web for stuff.....and unable to do so because of the handful of those who abuse school networks and bring them to their knees....
 
Looks like someone is using the schools megafast network to host a underground filesharing network :p
 
How many disks do you have in the file server? Unless you have 15k SAS/FC drives or a bunch of SATA in raid10 or a lot in raid5, you're not going to push a gigiabit out from the server to begin with, so the bottleneck isn't the LAN connection.
 
da sponge said:
How many disks do you have in the file server? Unless you have 15k SAS/FC drives or a bunch of SATA in raid10 or a lot in raid5, you're not going to push a gigiabit out from the server to begin with, so the bottleneck isn't the LAN connection.
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Agree; also is he trying to load balance his server? I am having trouble following his goal.
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
I feel bad for the unfortunate other students that get online to actually do something like...research, e-mail family and loved ones, surf the web for stuff.....and unable to do so because of the handful of those who abuse school networks and bring them to their knees....
Click to expand...

the file server has the support of every student in the dorm, since the dorm is kinda small. So obviously some media will be stored, but some of my classmates want extra storage space for their research files, programs, kernels, etc.

The file server will have one raid 5 SATA array, but will also have a smaller 15k SAS raid 5 array. If we have about 20 people accessing the server at any given time, how can I optimize the load? If the LAN connection isn't the bottleneck, then I guess I get no benefit from using a multiport NIC.

The raid 5 SATA will be about 6 TB made of 750 GB drives, so about 12 drives. The SAS array will be much smaller, maybe just 3 drives; its so expensive :(
 
You would need access to the switch configuration to trunk the ports together. Not much point in a multi-port nic without this.

Are you certain a single gigabit port is holding you back?
 
What OS are you running? I cannot remember if link aggregation is supported on anything up to Windows 2003. Yes you would need access to the switch if you want to trunk the connections. Trunking at the NICs is less successful from what I have seen.

Besides, I think to get any noticeable bandwidth increases you would need a good deal of ports and I don't know your schools policy for letting student mess with their stuff, but they could end up not caring. Secondly, what files could be so important or big that you would need 15k SAS drives? At 3 disk ($1500) your only going to get about 550-600GB.

At least its not a RAID10.
 
Ah ok, it's called link aggregation, I couldn't find the term so I couldn't google it :(

The bottleneck is either the gigabit port or my raid5 sata, which will probably all be Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000's. I don't have any hard data as to which would be the bottleneck.

According to wikipedia, link aggregation with multiport NICs can significantly increase bandwidth, although there weren't any sources or references, so I don't know how to take that information

My OS is fairly flexible, but the current option is Windows Server 2008. I could definitely go with Debian though.
 
Quick example - My current office of 30+ folks comes nowhere close to saturating 1gbit at any time. My former job - a call center of 1700+ used 100mbit - and that wasn't saturated either. They moved to 1gbit simply to reduce latency. Once the upgrade was complete the 1gbit never got past 50% usage.

I think your single link will work very well and I'd be surprised if you had any bottlenecks at all.
 
Search terms for you:
Link Aggregation
NIC teaming
NIC bonding
Port trunking

Different manufacturers call it different things and not all NIC drivers support it.
 
bobdole369 said:
Quick example - My current office of 30+ folks comes nowhere close to saturating 1gbit at any time. My former job - a call center of 1700+ used 100mbit - and that wasn't saturated either. They moved to 1gbit simply to reduce latency. Once the upgrade was complete the 1gbit never got past 50% usage.

I think your single link will work very well and I'd be surprised if you had any bottlenecks at all.
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in regards to bandwidth, I'm more concerned about bandwidth peaks, where even if 5 people are downloading or uploading files, I think the gigabit becomes the bottleneck, because each person would be down/uploading files at a rate of 25 MB/s, assuming that I get the full theoretical gigabit ethernet speed

I suppose a better question would be if I were to trunk with a dual NIC, would the speed increase and connection redundancy justify an extra $100?
 
mpoon2489 said:
in regards to bandwidth, I'm more concerned about bandwidth peaks, where even if 5 people are downloading or uploading files, I think the gigabit becomes the bottleneck, because each person would be down/uploading files at a rate of 25 MB/s, assuming that I get the full theoretical gigabit ethernet speed

I suppose a better question would be if I were to trunk with a dual NIC, would the speed increase and connection redundancy justify an extra $100?
Click to expand...

Do you have configuration access to the switch? You need to configure it on the nics & the switch.
 
I have admin access to all the hardware and software that powers my dorm's connection
 
relic said:
Search terms for you:
Link Aggregation
NIC teaming
NIC bonding
Port trunking

Different manufacturers call it different things and not all NIC drivers support it.
Click to expand...

damn skippy! You may need server grade NICs to do the job.
 
mpoon2489 said:
in regards to bandwidth, I'm more concerned about bandwidth peaks, where even if 5 people are downloading or uploading files, I think the gigabit becomes the bottleneck, because each person would be down/uploading files at a rate of 25 MB/s, assuming that I get the full theoretical gigabit ethernet speed

I suppose a better question would be if I were to trunk with a dual NIC, would the speed increase and connection redundancy justify an extra $100?
Click to expand...

It also matters what their write speeds are for downloading.
 
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